Experimenting with anarchistic approaches to collaborative planning: The Planning Free School of Chattanooga

Urban planners have long recognized that collaborative planning processes can lead to more equitable development outcomes. Despite this recognition, calls for greater inclusion, community self-determination, and equitable decision making appear louder than ever before. This study combines narrative and dialogic analysis to examine the transformative impacts and limits of the Planning Free School of Chattanooga, an experimental collaborative planning initiative launched in Chattanooga, Tennessee, to engage historically underrepresented and marginalized residents in local planning conversations and decision making. The Planning Free School model was rooted in anarchistic principles of horizontal, learner-driven engagement, critical self-reflection, capacity building, and antiracist praxis. Over 5 months, 52 workshops, organized as issue-based discussion groups, critical conversations, transformative place-making sessions, and skill shares, were conducted as part of the initiative. The study contends that the planning free school model may hold promise as a collaborative planning model for 4 reasons: (a) its independent, horizontal structure may attract participants who distrusted city staff; (b) the creative, nontraditional format of workshops can help participants reckon with local legacies of violence, exclusion, and uneven development; (c) it can support capacity building through a learner-driven, do-it-yourself curriculum; and (d) its flexibility and radical openness can allow participants to improvise and adapt to evolving political situations.